Ferdinand

@Archer If you get your insulation from say Seconds and Co (they get the Kingspan not quite perfect stuff), then you could get it well below half price (I recently paid approx £10 a sheet for a pallet of 50mm PIR 8x4s, delivered) - so the extra materials will cost you the same as the half-amount via a normal channel. I bought a shed to store it and the rest in which I will reuse elsewhere later. You just need somewhere to store it, and to watch the site for the correct stuff. Can save thousands if you do it with other materials too. F

Welcome. Do not underestimate how long this could take :-) .

@Andrew 1 - Go beyond the PDFs. Ask for a copy of the CAD data files and raw data files themselves as well as the PDF so you can give them to your architect / designer to load straight in. 2 - Consider whether you want the survey to be restricted to your personal use only, or whether you want the right to "Assign" it to a third party eg if you have to to sell - they may include that anyway, may add a small charge for that right, or may identify a reasonable price should you need to do that later (eg £25 admin fee). If you do not discuss, the fee might be £100 or £200 when you are over a barrel asking for a favour later. 3 - Make sure that they go far enough into the surroundings for anything you will need for your project .. eg the highway boundary, kerb lines, lane boundaries, and street furniture for your entrance design / splays. Ferdinand

@DundeeDancer Are you a hoary old landlord-developer with all the scars, or fairly new to this with only a few years and properties? I think my most useful comment would be that while tenants and purchasers will look at bling and finish when they move in, the place not to skimp is the stuff that means your tenants will stay for 6 years not one-and-a-half, and love living in your flat, since those extra 3 tenant changes could cost you the equivalent of six months rent. If you run the numbers a 5% higher rent takes 2 years to recover the loss of one month of rent if you have a one month longer void - without all the tenant swap costs. Even a 10-15% higher rent will take ages to cover all those. I would argue for not skimping on, for example, sound insulation, ventilation, energy efficiency, very bottom of range appliances, letting the first T choose the carpet colour, perhaps allowing pets (dog tenants stay longer) Mira shower, walk in shower not a telephone box type, and so on. It is very easy to get the things right that make a tenant move in, but avoiding the things that make a tenant move out is equally important. As one example, I have just had a T move into one of mine whose previous 3 bed end terrace was running energy bills of £200 per month. In my semi of the same age they will be saving about £120 a month, as they should come in for £750-1000 per year - not itself very good but reasonably OK and very comfortable. All depends on your market, mind, Ferdinand

As long as you have experience of project managing and ideally purchasing, you have a head start, Just make sure to reflect on how the skills transfer. 2-5% is the sort of reduction you might get to let them get the job ... but you risk that they may cut small corners to maintain the margin. It is far more robust to find ways to reduce *their* costs, as they can pass that through with no loss of margin. That comes down to things like cutting out waiting time, or finding bits of the project that are not necessary, you sourcing materials at 30% cheaper than they can, choosing other items which are as good but less expensive. All of that kind of "sweat the detail" stuff. If you save them a man-day of work it should be worth £100-200 to you. But if you are on a firm price contract you will have to agree terms up front so it is more challenging. The categories i tend to think in are saving money, risk and time for me or them. And there are tradeoffs. Ferdinand

Welcome to the site. All questions are good ones, especially the ones that other people are too embarrassed to ask.

One other thing to bear in mind is that if they are genuinely minor and do not impact others, and if you are not in a designated area - conservation area, national park etc, then the worst that is likely to happen enforcement wise will be a retrospective application ... which means that you get to keep your minor changes and there is a possibility of having to fill in a form later. Unless there is something that will make a neighbour get narked because you are impacting on them, or you are going over a redline which will challenge the authority of the LPA or are embarrassing them, then you are very likely to be OK. If your Planner visits you may be put on the spot. How likely is the Planner to visit after approval? What was it Ecclesiastes said? "There is no end to the filling in of forms, and too much paperwork will wear you out".(Ch 12:v11, paraphrased-ish.) Judgement call for you. Unless there is an elephant trap somewhere, I would expect to get away with it. You may find yourself having to get a retrospective Certificate of Lawfulness or Indemnity Policy when you sell it. (Obviously that is just my opinion not advice). Ferdinand

@hmpmarketing There's a good @JSHarris piece about this somewhere. It may, for example, help to explain that because your walls are all 20" thick there is less internal space, so it is actually less valuable than he thinks and even though it is the size of a bus garage you are actually living in the space of a telephone box. Or it may not .

If what you want to build is in accordance with what is in your Approved Plans, then it is not an amendment :-). Hopefully your non-specific window size doesn't mismatch with your new intention. They will be more exacting if it is on public view when finished.

I was also thinking that you could play a mental game of offsetting it against the 10k+ you saved on that use of SPONS to catch an overpriced quote. So you may actually be in a better position than you would have been without SPONS and no builder problems. That may or may not help. When I bought the wrong sort of insulation, and then had to buy a new shed to store it in, I felt it helped slightly that it was less than I had saved at Wickes on 3 for 2s etc. So I saved less money but got a free shed :-). Ferdinand

That is an excellent point. The one more project stage before fixing an issue costs an order of magnitude more continues all the way through ... even for 10 years after moving in. @recoveringacademic you are doing this the correct way. Ferdinand

Cheers. Useful information.

How long has that been there? I might go for something like 50x150 concrete edgings if I were being functional not decorative. I am a huge fan of the 1950s bullnose version, of which I seem to get oodles every time I renovate a house. F

Aiui that relates to the category of 'promotion' which can be broad, but there is also perhaps a time limit over publication. Though in the past in English defamation law each time a page is loaded has been considered as a new act of publication. OT: I have sometimes considered using it as a tool to deal with fake claims on 'facts' or FAQ pages by single issue campaigns, but never got around to it. They receive a huge number of complaints .. hundreds a week. If Durisol cooperate as they seem to have done, a request for a correction or a change of wording might be as effective in updating the website. Ferdinand

@Archer Remember the eternal money vs risk vs time pendulum. Just a small red flag .. Using a BN is fine but increases the risk of you getting poleaxed by circumstances or mistakes. You are are the one responsible so while you will save on your cash budget you will need to spend more on your time budget to keep the risks down by sweating the detail. I would suggest mentally increasing the time contingency and take a policy decision deliberately to resist the temptation to rush whenever it happens. Unless I suppose you shift the responsibility to the builder, who will then want more of your money to compensate him for the time he has to put in to manage the extra risk. I found a couple of nice cartoons. F

Online cards can be useful .. e.g. If you have a Curve card transactions can be tagged in the app and lists downloaded separately. Very useful. In addition since it is a debit card which immediately charges transactions to any of a number of cards you add to the app, you can charge debit card purchases to a credit card for reward points / cash back or to manage the time delay or even to feed debit card purchases through to a balance transfer card, while also effectively using a credit card where they are not accepted. Up to a limit cash from cash machines also earns whatever rewards your cc offers. F

Mind maps are useful for evolving visualisation. Not wanting to be morbid, however I hope that people with large volumes of files have a deletion strategy and instructions for their dearly beloved to dispose of the things that do not need to be kept or examined when the Grim Reaper finally comes to call. And something could be in place now since the grim reaper can come suddenly. When my father died we had literally rooms of files to peruse from a 40 year architectural practice. Unfortunately the house and garden was like a mini Calle Abbey .. big enough never to require a clear out, and it took literally months to examine everything just in case. Ferdinand

Tesco have a 46% discount on an excellent Prosecco at present. This one, which is a dry Prosecco. Reduced from £90 for a case to £48. It is delicious, and looks good so a good one to take when invited out or to give as a present. I have had about 3 cases of this over the last year or two, and I will be getting at least one more now. Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore Docg Extra Dry Ca'Val Tesco Ergo Yum. (Spend another £12+ on something else and it is free delivery - though since it is wine by the case you may need to spend more). Ferdinand

Was it a fixed price quote ?

Welcome to the forum. Is the D for Richard, and are you the person who built those jet-powered world record speed cars? Fun, if so. However. To me the proposal for that cladding does not sound sufficiently "belt and braces". It could be mitigated by eg planting an evergreen windbreak reasonably close, which would help with the type of driving rain which might be a problem. I wonder if face-edge-face-edge cladding or vertical on vertical as suggested above (like a hit and miss fence with no inside gap) would be preferable? The second pic below is the horizontal version of what I call face-edge-face-edge. I can see that a vertical version of that might be beneficial depending on your prevailing wind angle onto the wall. It also depends on your board dimensions. Alternatively you could go horizontal and either detail carefully to disguise future staining, or do something interesting such as scorch your planks - if you are cash poor time rich you could DIY that finish. With all wood cladding, detailing is the most important thing after choosing the appropriate version for the context. I think it may be beneficial to look at 15 year old versions of your options - just see one and go and knock on the door. People will often love to talk about it and explain how they got what they wanted (or not). Ferdinand

Strange. Are the Council even technically correct in saying that when it is not in the nature of the thing to be illy accessible? Is a Yurt in a field accessible? Even static caravans at Mablethorpe are not fully accessible. How does that relate to George Clarke's Small Spaces programmes? He always says talk to the Council about PP before starting any project. Ferdinand

Hmm. Was that enforcement not because of the existence rather than the size of the home? Can you link to the petition / reports that explain exactly what they want to repeal? I would like to know more on this. On first reflection, I am not totally convinced that a 150sqft caravan or shack takes up much less space than say a 400sqft one. Not sure if a tiny one is actually much less expensive to create. For high density flats I would concede a difference. For an analogy, my Vauxhall Corsa does not take up much less space on the road than my neighbour's Audi Q7 .. because as with houses most of the road area is made up with of space between them. Cheers F

The other issue is that the garage may provide an easier way into the house if your garage door is less secure than your front door ... which suggests an external quality door. An alternative to steel could be a fibreboard external door. That would be better insulation wise but more expensive. Ferdinand

If you keep it all in the computer then you cannot see that it is disorganised, so it helps you feel better .

What are the hosting company refusing to help you with. Just removal of the content? One approach is to invoice them for the use of the pictures at a commercial rate, then follow up the debt in the small claims or Irish equivalent. Or are there any routes via Google to remove them from the search engine? F